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HCMWorks Insights

What is a Talent Pool and How Can Your Business Build One?

Posted by HCM Works on 20 Aug 2019

Ensuring your company has the best talent in the right jobs and at the right time is essential for the future success of your company, but having the right candidates in place to engage within a moments notice is no easy task.

Meeting workforce objectives isn’t as simple as reaching out to the perfect candidate and filling an open vacancy immediately. There’s no guarantee that you’ll find the right candidate, that they’ll be available when you need them or that they’ll want to work with your company.

That’s why it’s essential your organization creates a talent pool, but what actually is a talent pool, how can it benefit the recruitment strategy of your company and how do you build one? We explain all in this blog.

What is a talent pool?

A talent pool is a database of potential job candidates that have already shown interest in working for your organization. The candidates in this talent pool will have the potential to meet your immediate, short-term or long-term needs.

Including both full-time and contingent workers, your company’s talent pool will store information about each prospect - including the roles they could fill, their skills, how they’ll help you meet your objectives and whether they’ll fit in with your company culture.

A talent pool will feature sources for talent acquisition such as staffing agencies, recruiting companies, previous employees and social media contacts, as well as making a note of internal talent who have the ability to advance within your organization and contingent workers who you can build a long-term partnership with.

The benefits of a talent pool

Building a talent pool can bring your business a wide range of benefits, from reducing talent acquisition costs, finding a way around today’s shortage in skilled labour, speeding up the recruitment process, identifying your company’s skills gaps and much more.

HCMWorks has created a list of the top three benefits here:

  1. Reducing the time to hire: With the creation of a talent pool your organization can significantly reduce the time it takes you to hire the right candidates. Not only will you be able to bypass the time-consuming nature of screening, selecting and interviewing candidates, you’ll also have a clear thought out strategy of which hires will help your business reach its goal.
  2. Identifying quality candidate to fill both short-term and long-term needs: A talent pool is the start of an overall workforce strategy that will give you more visibility and control into your current workers and which workers you need to hire to meet workforce objectives. The result? You’ll be able to identify the right workers before the position even needs to be filled, helping you to achieve both short-term and long-term goals.
  3. Reducing recruitment costs: A talent pull will completely negate the need for a large portion of those expensive and time-consuming jobs you have to perform when hiring a new worker. That’s not even mentioning the money you can save by avoiding a bad hire.

How can your business create a talent pool?

There a few different ways that your company can create a talent pool through either inbound or outbound recruiting strategy. While it will take some time to create your talent pool, the benefits will be well worth it in the end. The most common ways to build a talent pool include:

Previous applicants: Often known as ‘silver medalists’, these are the candidates that were incredibly close to getting the job but got pipped to the post by a candidate that was slightly more qualified for the role. They should be added to your prospects for future roles, not simply discarded.

Work experience schemes: If you run work experience schemes and internships then this is a fantastic way to not only give students their first taste of the business world but to also start adding the next generation of talented workers to your talent pool.

Employees who leave your company: When good employees leave your organization it doesn’t mean it’s a goodbye forever, and that’s even more true for contingent workers. Those who leave your company might be opening to rejoining if you engage with them at the right time.

Other methods include:

  • Career fairs and events
  • Online CV databases
  • Networking events
  • Social media networking

Want to learn more about creating your very own talent pool? HCMWorks provides its clients with talent pool and contingent workforce management solutions that improve the visibility of your workers and potential workforce through complex reporting and analytics.

We have years of experience in helping to implement and optimize talent acquisition and management strategies, so contact us today to find out more.

Human Capital Management Trends

Tags: Contingent Workforce

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